This way-out combination of family drama, madcap plot, and political edge ends up being quite endearing.
The five children of Cyril Pennington learn they have something more in common than their father's DNA.
The many fans of Carty-Williams' debut, Queenie (2019), will have lots of fun with her sophomore effort, another high-spirited, socially conscious novel set in South London. Of the five Pennington offspring, only the eldest and the youngest, Nikisha and Prynce, have the same mother (Cyril stopped by to drop off a card for Nikisha's 10th birthday; Prynce was born nine months later). The second oldest is Danny, whose mother is White, then Dimple and Lizzie, only a few weeks apart in age, with Indian Jamaican and Yoruba mothers, respectively. Kudos to Carty-Williams for defining each of these many characters so clearly that you can easily keep track of who's who. Cyril would proudly claim the same, his interpretation of fatherhood entailing being "generally aware that he had five children (and possibly more, but he wasn’t going to go looking), remembering their names and sometimes their birthdays, and asking them for money when times were hard." As the book opens, the kids range in age from 9 to 19, and Cyril has decided it's time for them to meet. He drives around and picks them all up in his gold Jeep, which he loves "more than anything else in his life and he [doesn’t] see a problem with that"—but the meeting doesn't go all that well. Nobody smiles except him, Nikisha fat-shames Dimple, Lizzie just wants to go home and "tell her mum that Cyril had basically kidnapped her and forced her to spend time with a group of Jamaicans." They don't see each other again for 16 years, when Dimple accidentally murders her boyfriend and calls on her siblings for help. This unfolding mishap is the main narrative line around which the characters transform into a family, also coping with racism, toxic relationships, social media crises, and intergenerational trauma along the way.
This way-out combination of family drama, madcap plot, and political edge ends up being quite endearing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9604-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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